L.A. Noire's faces may be impressive, but they've got nothing on this.

Much hubbub has been made over Team Bondi's superb facial animation in Rockstar crime drama L.A. Noire. It's the sort of thing that actually turns game characters into something resembling real-life people, without the hollow stare that haunts conversations in other games made by companies whose names begin with "B."

Unfortunately for Team Bondi, Janimation has them one better. A Janimation employee sent a video over to Kotaku regarding his company's proprietary new facial rendering tech, and it's damn impressive.

Skip to about 0:35 into the video to see how it looks in real-life - and brother, it looks painful. I'm sure you get used to wearing all those shiny little diodes, but it kind of reminds me of that dude from Hellraiser.

Also, the tooth decay in the finished model is a bit unsettling. The original model had perfectly fine teeth, guys. Can't we leave it at that?

My only minor complaint would be the "You're doomed!" test... The render didn't seem to translate the roll of the lips that take place with the "oom" sound, making a powerful line look like it was uttered from an excessively small mouth. I'm sure it's something that can, and will, be fixed in later iterations, either through mmore robust translation through code, or post-recording tweaks via the techs.

Hey, I like BioWare... but I don't necessarily admire their conversation animation, so whatever. Not sure if they even use performance capture though; it works better for certain styles, after all. This seems like decent tech, so long as it works in-game and still looks good. Overall, I've seen better motion/performance capture, but this still looks good.

I wonder if animators will be needed if all animation is performed by the diodes on the actor.

Also seems like an odd design choice to be using this tech for a photo realistic human face... wouldn't you just need an actor for that? I'm not saying it's not impressive, but I think it would have been more interesting to show a non human character with the human expression.

NickCaligo42:Not impressed. Show me an actual performance with it, not just a technical test, and show it to me on a facial model that can actually make it into a game. Then maybe we'll talk.

my sentiments exactly. until this can be rendered in a game that is more than a smiling contest and has all sorts of other crap going on around it, theres not much to this. games are struggling enough as it is to have decent amounts of content with how painstaking it is to render current graphics and the average development cycle, we sure as hell dont need to set the bar any higher right now and reduce the average game to the previously mentioned smiling contests.

Most impressive, but I'd rather see this as an actual performance, not a technical test. Plus, it felt that the face was overall just a tad bit too stiff. Like, parts of the face wouldn't move as much as a regular face would, making the skin look extremely leathery or something.

NickCaligo42:Not impressed. Show me an actual performance with it, not just a technical test, and show it to me on a facial model that can actually make it into a game. Then maybe we'll talk.

my sentiments exactly. until this can be rendered in a game that is more than a smiling contest and has all sorts of other crap going on around it, theres not much to this. games are struggling enough as it is to have decent amounts of content with how painstaking it is to render current graphics and the average development cycle, we sure as hell dont need to set the bar any higher right now and reduce the average game to the previously mentioned smiling contests.

Hence it being a tech test. What you guys are doing is akin to whining because you have a Sega Saturn incapable of loading a library for rigid body physics, or because you don't have a PC that is capable enough to run a prototype iteration of Unreal Engine that is still in development.

There's plenty of reason to actually get impressed, namely the fact that, in the future, human actors will be able to actually lend a performance in a game. This is not current-gen suff you guys--or at least not the way it runs on the video.

-Dragmire-:I wonder if animators will be needed if all animation is performed by the diodes on the actor.

MoCap isn't cheap to get done. It's faster for obtaining natural movement patterns and the like but also limited to what the MoCap actors can do.

I'm also quite sure any MoCop studio would prefer a dev's animators do something like a crocodile rather than have them bring one in for the studio to try and put in a mocap rig.

Also seems like an odd design choice to be using this tech for a photo realistic human face... wouldn't you just need an actor for that? I'm not saying it's not impressive, but I think it would have been more interesting to show a non human character with the human expression.

Human to Human transposition is the hardest to do because unnatural movement is easy to spot. It's what we're most familiar with, after all.

LA Noir's characters are overrated. If you want prune men, sure, but they look like they are gonna peel off.Also, I dont really want games to get too realistic. When the fake looks just like the real, then I may buy the "video games make murderers".

Lol. It is amusing to see you all fascinated for the first time viewing of this amazing technology. However, this level of mocap quality is apparently not new. Take a look at these videos, the earliest dated as February 2008.